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0:38

Before we begin, this episode contains

0:40

adult language.

0:50

In 1991, when Joel Meyer, a senior

0:52

editor and producer at Slate, was 14 years old, he

0:55

went to the very first Lollapalooza

0:57

concert tour when it stopped in St. Paul,

0:59

Minnesota. It might have even been my

1:02

first concert without a parent involved.

1:05

There were so many bands he and his friends

1:07

loved playing. Jane's Addiction,

1:09

Living Color, and especially

1:12

Henry Rollins from the hardcore

1:14

band Black Flag.

1:18

We thought he was kind of the coolest

1:20

guy that we had ever seen. As

1:23

Joel and his buddies watched Henry Rollins,

1:25

sweating and shirtless and caught up in the

1:27

moment, they got caught up in the moment too.

1:30

Full of energy and fearlessness and

1:32

adolescent

1:33

boy oomph, they decided

1:35

they needed to go into the mosh pit.

1:39

Because I'm a very cautious and conservative

1:41

person by nature, I think I was maybe the

1:43

last person to go in, but then

1:45

I did it.

1:46

A mosh pit is a staple of a Henry

1:49

Rollins show.

1:57

The problem is I wear glasses and

1:59

I have I've had to wear glasses since the fourth grade,

2:02

and I can't see anything without them.

2:05

Within about maybe 20 seconds of going into the

2:07

pit, lost those glasses right away,

2:09

and I was terrified. He couldn't

2:11

see very well. He sure wasn't gonna be

2:13

able to see any of the other bands, and his mom

2:16

was gonna be pissed. My glasses

2:18

were probably the most valuable thing that

2:20

I owned. So Joel steeled himself and

2:22

pushed his way back into the

2:25

seething mass of people.

2:28

My hands, and the trash can't turn

2:30

down. And lo and behold,

2:32

I looked over, and there was this guy

2:34

whose face I will never forget. And

2:37

he was having the time of his life being

2:40

hit on all sides by human bodies.

2:43

But he was with one hand holding

2:45

in the air my glasses, and

2:47

he gave him back. Then he just kind of vanished.

2:50

I think he wore glasses.

2:52

A good Samaritan was the last thing

2:54

Joel had expected to find.

2:57

But it turns out the moshpit contains

2:59

all sorts of surprises. ["The

3:02

Moshpit

3:02

of the Moshpit"]

3:09

This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin.

3:11

The moshpit has a reputation. It's a

3:14

violent place inhabited by mostly

3:16

white guys getting their aggression out. And

3:18

you know, there's some truth there. But it's

3:21

also a place where strangers will save

3:23

your glasses, a place bound by camaraderie,

3:26

and believe it or not, etiquette. In

3:28

this episode, Dakota Ring's producer,

3:30

Katie Shepherd, is going to satisfy her lifelong

3:33

curiosity about moshing, a

3:36

50-year-old cross-genre live

3:38

music phenomenon

3:39

that's alive and well to this day.

3:42

She's gonna speak with punks, physicists, and

3:44

the people who just can't stop doing

3:46

it to learn about moshings' unwritten

3:48

rules. So today on Dakota

3:51

Ring, what's really going

3:53

on? Inside a Moshpit.

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5:29

Katie's going to jump in now. I've always

5:31

had complicated feelings about moshing.

5:34

I had a set idea of what it was. I'm

5:36

either going to get punched in the face tonight or I'm going to punch

5:38

someone else in the face. And

5:40

though I didn't want to punch anyone in the face, the

5:43

idea of jumping around, screaming,

5:46

thrashing, losing myself in a mashup humanity

5:48

appealed to me. It looked like

5:51

a release. So

5:53

back in 2011 when I was 22, I finally decided to do it. Go

5:59

into the mosh.

7:59

the basis for the

8:01

Sex Pistols, one of the earliest bands

8:03

to self-identify as punk. He

8:05

claimed around 1976, he created

8:07

one of punk's hallmark moves, just

8:10

to get out his agitation with another group

8:12

of guys.

8:13

The simple move became known as pogoing,

8:16

and it spread through the punk scene and those

8:18

adjacent to it. The pogo has

8:21

been done like this. That's

8:25

Debbie Harry of the New Wave band Blondie. She's

8:27

jumping up and down on a black and white Manhattan

8:30

cable access show in 1978. But

8:32

you

8:33

have to sew an archer back and

8:35

throw your head around. After you do this for half

8:37

an hour, the idea is to

8:39

sprinkle beer on your head, like this.

8:43

The pogo doesn't look like much, but that

8:45

was kind of the point. Punks wanted to get

8:47

as far from the polished moves of disco like

8:50

the bump and the hustle

8:51

as they could. They wanted to be reckless,

8:54

rowdy, and sloppy, and smash into each

8:56

other. And over time, this chaos

8:58

got codified and became a kind of standard

9:00

feature of shows. It happened

9:02

in the hardcore scene. I hate my

9:05

boss. I hate the people that I work with.

9:07

I hate my parents. I hate these authoritative

9:10

figures.

9:10

This is Keith Morris of the hardcore

9:12

bands Circle Jerks and Black Flag talking

9:15

about the scene's attitude in the documentary

9:17

American Hardcore. And now I have a chance

9:20

to be with a bunch of my own type of people,

9:22

and I have a chance to go off.

9:24

And at every hardcore show, you could

9:26

find exactly that, attendees

9:29

going off. There

9:31

was nothing more taking it to

9:33

the furthest extreme than destroying

9:35

everybody in the crowd. Stephen Blush

9:38

is the director of American Hardcore. I

9:40

compare it a lot to Lord of the Flies,

9:43

where the kids have to run their own

9:45

society, and it

9:47

works out really well for a while, and

9:49

then it eventually goes to hell.

9:52

The violence at hardcore shows could be a lot,

9:54

but it was communal. There's an inner peace

9:57

in that storm that you find with the

9:59

like-minded. people. And

10:01

the minute you step out of that, you're back

10:03

to reality. But

10:06

while you're in it,

10:08

it's this incredible, powerful

10:10

force. It was

10:13

also at hardcore shows that some pits

10:15

begin to take the shape often seen at concerts

10:17

today. And you keep moving

10:19

around in a circle like this, because that's

10:21

the way the pit moves is in a circle. This

10:24

is

10:24

a scene from the 1983 documentary

10:27

Another State of Mind about two punk bands

10:29

on tour. The

10:38

young

10:38

man talking is in a small, empty

10:40

dingy room, and he's wearing a white t-shirt

10:43

and trousers, and he has closely shorn hair.

10:46

As he's talking, he's demonstrating,

10:48

bent over at the waist, swinging his arms

10:51

and pacing in a circle. Some people call

10:53

it slamming, and some people call it pogolin,

10:56

and some call it the skang. But I

10:59

just call it dancing because that's normally what you're doing.

11:01

What he's doing is basically what we

11:03

think of as mashing. But in the early

11:06

80s, most people weren't calling it that yet.

11:09

As I understand it, the

11:11

word mosh comes from a

11:14

misinterpretation. James Spooner

11:16

is an artist and filmmaker behind the Afropunk

11:19

documentary and music festival. He

11:21

says the story goes that the term originated

11:23

in the early 80s with Bad Brains, an

11:26

influential hardcore band whose members

11:28

were Black and Rastafari.

11:38

During a Bad Brains show, the lead singer said

11:40

to mash down Babylon, which had appeared

11:43

in a number of old reggae songs, like

11:45

this one performed by Leroy King.

11:52

But the crowd misunderstood the Bad Brains singer.

11:55

hear

12:00

him say, mash down Babylon and like

12:04

don't already know that phrase and

12:07

invent a completely new word. Mashing,

12:11

or mashing, was born. By

12:13

the early 1990s, it had spread to

12:15

the dozens of offshoots of punk, as well as

12:18

heavy metal and grunge.

12:26

In 1992, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen

12:29

Spirit became the biggest song in the world.

12:32

The video showed people mashing in a

12:34

dank, dark high school gym. And

12:36

with that, mashing went mainstream.

12:43

I remember being a sophomore

12:46

in high school, walking into this

12:48

club and seeing the mosh

12:51

pit and understanding that these

12:53

kids have no idea what

12:55

they're doing. These are a bunch of kids

12:58

who saw the

13:01

Smells Like Teen Spirit video and

13:03

are just bouncing off each other.

13:05

They don't understand that there are moves. I

13:08

have to be honest, initially it never

13:10

really occurred to me that there were mashing moves

13:13

either. I thought the whole point of

13:15

mashing was that it was freedom to

13:17

do whatever you want. But James,

13:20

a long time masher himself, set me straight. The

13:22

kids that people notice and

13:25

are like enjoy watch dancing

13:28

are also just good dancers. James

13:31

told me the first time he realized this was

13:33

in his mid-twenties. He was dating

13:36

a choreographer whose style was rooted

13:38

in Haitian dance. She invited

13:40

James to show some mashing moves to her dance

13:42

group. And in return, the dancers

13:45

showed him their own similar moves based

13:47

on West African and Haitian dance. James

13:50

noticed similarities in other styles, too.

13:53

If you go

13:55

to a Jamaican dance hall,

13:58

they're doing like the Ducky Wine.

13:59

It looks a lot like head banging. I've

14:02

seen stuff in Jamaican dance halls

14:05

that look more like

14:06

WWF wrestling than

14:10

anything I've seen at a punk show, which

14:12

is why I say the whole world

14:14

mashes.

14:16

Mashing has a whole bunch of other moves. There's

14:19

the two-step, a syncopated stutter step.

14:22

There's also windmills, which are all about whirling

14:24

your arms, and picking up change, which

14:26

is punching your arms down toward the ground and then

14:28

throwing your elbows back. Of

14:30

course, there's head banging, stage diving, and

14:33

crowd surfing. There's also the much

14:35

more nerve-wracking wall of death, where

14:37

the crowd splits in two and runs

14:40

at each other like they're in Braveheart.

14:47

That wall of death is from a show by the band Lamb

14:49

of God. But one of the things

14:51

that James said that most convinced me the mosh

14:53

pit isn't the chaotic, lawless place

14:55

I thought

14:56

was also one of the simplest.

14:59

My first show, I went the wrong way

15:01

in the circle pit, and I got trampled. I

15:04

never did that again. Nobody told

15:06

me that, oh, the circle pit always

15:09

goes counterclockwise. And

15:11

this is just one of the ways there's some order at

15:13

work,

15:14

even if outsiders can't see it. What

15:16

always excited me about this space is that

15:18

there are a lot of unwritten rules

15:21

to keep it constructive

15:22

and not actually

15:25

true chaos. It might look

15:27

like chaos, but it's not.

15:29

Christina Long grew up in the Midwest

15:31

and has been mashing since she was a teen. She's

15:34

the co-founder of Black Girls World. It's

15:36

an organization that celebrates black women

15:38

and women of color who participate

15:40

in heavy music genres. She co-founded

15:43

the organization with her sister, Courtney, who

15:45

also loves to mosh. I'm

15:47

usually described as a happy-go-lucky,

15:51

sickly-positive-sometimes kind

15:53

of person. And I'm like, if

15:55

y'all knew the

15:57

anger I had inside

15:59

of me. that I'm

16:01

only allowed to express through

16:03

these rock shows, through music,

16:06

you need that outlet sometimes when you feel

16:08

powerless.

16:09

But Christina says that doesn't mean they

16:11

haven't been knocked around some.

16:13

I've had my glasses broken. I

16:15

lost a shoe one time. I

16:18

had an asthma attack one time. I

16:20

had a guy get KO'd. He

16:23

was completely knocked out, stone cold, and

16:25

he fell on me. But in

16:27

all those situations, the people around me

16:30

helped. They didn't just ignore us.

16:32

She says this kind of help isn't rare.

16:35

It's one of Moshings' unwritten rules.

16:39

Well, the first rule is if

16:42

somebody falls down, pick them up.

16:44

If you see someone in trouble, somebody's

16:47

struggling, you gotta help them.

16:50

But there's another, less chill rule,

16:52

too. If you don't want to be in the goddamn

16:54

Mosh pit, get the hell out of the way. Even

16:57

so, her sister Courtney actually

16:59

feels safer at concerts where people mosh,

17:02

because the rules are much more explicit and

17:04

everyone knows what to expect. I

17:07

was the most scared, I think, at a Lizzo concert.

17:09

Some of those people, they were like

17:11

dressed to the nines and all these sparkly

17:14

outfits, and they were ready to fight about

17:16

who was closest to the stage. I

17:19

love Lizzo, but I would go with a friend

17:21

for some protection. Christina

17:24

and Courtney sense that Mosh pits are, in

17:26

their own way, orderly, is actually

17:29

backed up by something surprising,

17:32

physics. More on that when

17:34

we come back.

17:38

I

17:56

can show you, but it will cost you three

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dollars.

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tickets now. Hey everybody, it's Tim Heidecker. You

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know me, Tim and Eric, bridesmaids, and

18:11

Fantastic Four. I'd like to personally

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invite you to listen to Office Hours Live with

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me and my co-hosts DJ

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Doug Pound. Hello. And Vic Berger.

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Howdy. Every week we bring you laughs, fun, games,

18:22

and lots of other surprises. It's live, we

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take your Zoom calls. Music. We love

18:27

having fun. Excuse me? Songs.

18:30

I like having fun. I like

18:32

to laugh. I like to meet

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people who can make me laugh.

18:37

Please subscribe. No.

18:41

Jesse Silverberg is a physicist who

18:44

is really into heavy metal. Black

18:46

metal, Christian metal, death metal, dark metal,

18:48

doom metal, extreme metal, folk

18:50

metal, yes, folk metal. That's from his TEDx

18:52

talk on the physics of mosh pits. Power progressive,

18:56

speed stoner symphonic, thrash, and

18:58

of course, just plain old heavy metal. I

19:01

became interested in moshming by

19:03

going to heavy metal concerts. When

19:06

he was an undergrad, he took a date to a

19:08

metal show, and they found themselves standing

19:10

to the side watching the mosh pit.

19:12

What had really jumped out of

19:15

me and was really distracting during that show

19:17

was not the date, which is probably where I

19:19

should have had my attention, frankly,

19:21

but being able to see the way that people

19:23

were moving and the way that the crowd was

19:26

moving collectively, it was very

19:28

reminiscent of a solid

19:30

state physics course that I've been taking.

19:32

The movement in the pit reminded Jesse of how

19:35

groups of fish swim collectively and

19:37

how birds flock. And Jesse wondered

19:39

if something similar wasn't happening with moshing.

19:42

He and his colleagues thought Newton's second law

19:44

of motion, force equals mass times

19:46

acceleration, might be an effective

19:48

way of looking at mosh pits. For

19:51

the purposes of studying moshing, they

19:53

defined

19:54

four forces, propulsion,

19:56

the force I generate when I move, repulsion

19:59

when to... people bounce off each other, noise,

20:02

which refers to the presence of randomness, and

20:04

lastly, the force of flocking, the

20:07

tendency for people to follow other

20:09

people around.

20:10

So the first thing that we did was

20:12

we wrote some computer

20:14

vision image analysis code that

20:17

quantified the motion of people in a mosh

20:19

pit.

20:20

The kind of motion they were quantifying was all

20:22

the jostling and bouncing and banging around

20:24

people doing the pit before a circle

20:26

starts to take shape. But what they found

20:29

when you put all these motions into the machine… It

20:32

was predictive. This computer

20:34

model predicted that when you get people bouncing

20:36

off each other, slamming and pogoing

20:38

and skanking, a circle will likely

20:41

start to emerge. Just the way birds will

20:43

flock or fish will form a shoal.

20:45

We didn't put

20:47

a circle pit into the model. We didn't bake

20:50

that into the equations. It emerged

20:52

naturally. And that is something

20:54

that is seen if you go to enough of

20:56

these shows.

20:58

You can create your own mosh pit simulation

21:00

using the same tools Jesse and his colleagues

21:03

did. We'll link to it in the show notes.

21:05

And you'll see how the circle pit emerges naturally.

21:08

It's just how humans arrange themselves. When,

21:11

you know, they're violently hurling themselves

21:13

at each other in an enclosed space while

21:15

listening to very loud music.

21:18

But

21:18

even as the pit has order, it's

21:20

also not without its flaws. If

21:22

there was a mosh pit of all boys and

21:25

they're asking their female friends

21:28

to hold their coats, the girls would be like,

21:30

this is messed up. Sarah

21:32

Marcus is the author of Girls to the Front,

21:34

the true story of the Riot Girl revolution

21:37

about the punk feminist movement in the 90s. I

21:40

don't just come to a show to be a coat rack while the

21:42

boys mosh. Getting treated like a coat rack

21:44

was just one thing. Another was that

21:46

women and people with physical vulnerabilities

21:48

would find themselves being pushed out of the pit by

21:50

aggressive male dancers, which

21:53

is why in the 1990s, the band Bikini

21:55

Kill started to make space for them at the front

21:57

of the stage by screaming the phrase

21:59

that gave

21:59

Sarah's book, its name.

22:07

Even with efforts like this, it could be hard

22:09

to tamp down the angst that Mashing releases

22:12

once it's out. Mashing is

22:14

like, it's fun and it's this great release,

22:16

but at the same time, like, you've opened

22:18

that box and it's hard to close it up again.

22:21

In other words, Mashing can also bring

22:23

out the worst in people. You have, like, horrible

22:26

fights breaking out at punk shows between,

22:28

like, Nazi skinheads and anti-Nazi

22:30

skinheads.

22:31

James Spooner also remembers Nazi

22:33

punks and skinheads at shows when he was growing up.

22:36

By the early 80s, there were already,

22:39

Nazi skins were a huge

22:41

part of the punk community

22:43

that we had to deal with. That wasn't like

22:46

a weird anomaly in my

22:48

small backwards town. And then

22:50

there's Mashing's biggest black eye. Shit

22:52

is fucked up, man. Let's

22:55

start a riot. Woodstock 99. The

22:58

riots. Woodstock 99

23:00

was a concert festival infamous for

23:02

being as violent

23:03

as the original Woodstock was peaceful.

23:05

It was one of those days that you're gonna break some shit.

23:09

For almost three days, the festival headlined

23:12

by a number of nu-metal bands was plagued by

23:14

poor sanitation and a lack

23:15

of drinking water. There were incidents

23:17

of sexual assault, and by the end, the

23:20

crowd of thousands descended into chaos.

23:23

All of this was captured by MTV, which blasted

23:25

images to its audience of burning fires

23:27

and thrashing seeding crowds

23:29

all Mashing as one.

23:41

Mashing had grown out of small communal scenes.

23:43

Basements and tiny venues where small

23:46

groups of people all knew the rules of the road.

23:48

At Woodstock 99, Mashing

23:51

became something completely different.

23:54

James Spooner. the

24:00

recipe times 100 and it just turns out like

24:02

garbage. There clearly were serious

24:04

problems with the crowd behavior there, but

24:06

usually most festivals there's very

24:09

little collective disorder.

24:10

Chris Cocking is a crowd management expert

24:13

who teaches social psychology at the University

24:15

of Brighton. Chris says it's not usually

24:17

the crowd that is to blame when something goes horribly

24:20

wrong at big events. In most

24:22

crowd disasters where people are killed

24:24

or injured, it's usually because of

24:26

structures or interventions outside

24:28

of the crowd itself. It's the way the security

24:31

or the venue are treating the crowd or thinking

24:33

about public safety. It's the way there's no

24:35

water or bathrooms, lack of infrastructure,

24:39

as was the case with Woodstock 99.

24:41

And sometimes it's fear of the

24:43

crowd in advance that causes

24:45

so many problems. When moshing

24:48

first started at some venues there was a

24:50

venue that's been bulldozed now that was called

24:52

the London Story. When they had thrash metal

24:54

bands playing there and the security were

24:56

not aware of the concept of moshing, they

24:58

almost started a riot because people

25:01

were moshing and people were trying to

25:03

stage dive and the security just basically

25:05

started beating the shit out of them. But

25:07

Chris saw moshers in the bands figure out

25:09

how to solve that problem by hiring

25:11

their own security that understood moshing.

25:15

And as long as basic requirements and safety

25:17

precautions are present, big crowds

25:19

tend to demonstrate a great deal of restraint.

25:22

Even if you have individuals who sit there

25:24

and go, I want to fuck things up and you know some

25:26

people mosh more vigorously than others.

25:30

I would say that doesn't translate into a kind

25:32

of collective mess where everybody

25:34

is moshing in a let's fuck things up kind

25:36

of way.

25:37

I'm often baffled

25:39

that concerts work at all. Strangers

25:42

packed into a venue together, waiting sometimes

25:45

for hours for the bands

25:46

to start, often in summertime heat.

25:49

There's booze and other substances.

25:51

There's short people who don't know what to do

25:54

about tall people and the other way around.

25:57

People who arrive late and push in front of the ones

25:59

who got their door. It's easy

26:01

to see how things can get out of control. Except

26:04

they rarely do. And

26:07

when they do, it's like a plane crash.

26:10

This very irregular event that's so

26:12

horrible, it's kind of all you can

26:14

think about. Eclipsing the hundreds of

26:16

thousands of times, things went fine.

26:19

Or maybe even better than fine. This

26:22

is also

26:23

true of mosh pits. Kristina

26:26

Long. If anyone is there

26:28

to cause harm and they indicate

26:30

that they're there to hurt someone on purpose,

26:33

we as a community will pick you up

26:35

and kick you out of the venue.

26:39

So with Kristina's reassurances and

26:41

the laws of physics, with Chris Cocking's expertise

26:44

and James Spooner's list of moshing moves, I

26:46

felt newly curious. I

26:49

wanted to experience a mosh pit

26:51

again. But not fully confident

26:53

about jumping in, I asked the Long

26:55

Sisters if one of them might be willing

26:58

to go with me. If in the next month

27:00

you end up going to a show and

27:03

mosh and maybe I could record you before

27:06

you go in. Would that be hilarious?

27:07

After the break,

27:09

with the help of Kristina, I head back

27:12

to the mosh pit.

27:20

Okay, so we're in Times Square

27:22

on a side street here. I

27:24

met up with Kristina Long at a venue called

27:27

The Palladium to see a metalcore show. A

27:29

band called The Devil Wears Prada opened for

27:31

another called August Burns Red. They've

27:34

been around for at least a decade each, if

27:36

not longer, and they're very well known

27:38

in the scene. The Palladium holds about 2,000

27:40

people, and as we

27:42

entered, a small mosh pit was already

27:45

moving in the middle of the room. I

27:47

asked her why it wasn't right in front of the stage.

27:49

She had to scream to be heard. The

27:51

serious fans? Who've

27:55

been waiting for hours to see their

27:57

artists, they're not gonna move. They're

28:00

not moves. They're committed. Almost

28:02

everyone in the pit was a man. When the show

28:05

starts again, look around and see

28:07

if anybody's staring at you like any men

28:09

are saying

28:10

that you — sometimes they're very shocked, like,

28:13

a girl's here, and she likes

28:15

it. Soon enough, the band The Devil Wears

28:17

Prada took the stage. It's

28:20

fucking

28:21

good to be back in New York City!

28:25

Let's do it!

28:29

One of Christina's favorite fans, the Acacia

28:32

Strain, sums up what she loves about

28:34

this scene. Earlier, she told

28:36

me they start their shows by announcing

28:38

that audience members were safe to express anger

28:41

or any feelings they might have about being

28:43

neglected and unloved.

28:45

We want you to know there's a place for you

28:47

to go to express

28:49

yourself in all the things you

28:51

feel so that you don't go back out in

28:53

the world and do something worse.

28:56

And then the musician

28:58

would say, in

29:00

the next breath, I also would

29:02

like you all to know that I hate you all

29:04

and I hope you fucking die. And

29:07

then he would go, let us all

29:09

proceed to rage. She

29:12

loved it. The drama, the

29:15

honesty, the contradiction, the

29:17

space to be seen, to be angry,

29:20

to be mean. And I

29:22

get that. Anger is an emotion

29:25

we're supposed to douse quickly.

29:27

But what if, in the right place, with

29:31

others who understand us, we didn't

29:33

have to? When the moshing

29:35

started, I could picture it. Jumping

29:38

into the pit, losing myself, releasing

29:40

some primal rage

29:41

and screaming into each other's faces,

29:44

I got close to the edge of the pit.

29:47

But I couldn't bring myself

29:49

to jump in. Just

29:54

like last time, I realized moshing

29:57

just isn't me. Still. I

30:00

was happy to take it all in from a distance

30:03

with Christina my mashing guide by my side

30:11

And

30:12

I could see how much it meant to the people

30:14

in the pit That this was their place

30:16

to come together to get some frustration out

30:19

all while dancing really really

30:21

violently

30:25

After the show was over I asked Christina

30:28

to hang back to rate the night's

30:30

mashing

30:35

As she was talking I realized

30:38

the mashers at this metal core show They

30:42

were singing a song I knew It's

30:45

cracking me up that sweet Carolina's playing

30:47

and everybody knows the words At

30:50

that moment listening to a Neil Diamond

30:52

song about people reaching out to one another I understood

30:56

how someone could be scared at the mosh pit

30:58

and how someone else

31:00

could jump in face first Touching

31:06

hand Reaching

31:11

out Touching

31:14

me Touching

31:17

you Sweet

31:21

Caroline

31:34

This is decoder ring I'm Katie

31:36

Shepherd and I'm Willa Paskin If you

31:38

have any cultural mysteries you want us to

31:40

decode you can email us at decoder

31:42

ring at slate.com This

31:45

episode was written by Katie Shepherd Katie

31:47

Shepherd and Willa Paskin produced decoder

31:49

ring This episode was edited by Andrea

31:51

Bruce and Willa Paskin with help from Joel

31:54

Meyer Derek John is slate's executive producer

31:56

of narrative podcasts. Marat Jacob is

31:58

senior technical director

31:59

Thank you to Vivian Goldman, Paolo

32:02

Raugusa, and Philip Moriarty, whose

32:04

insights and research on moshing were crucial

32:06

to this episode. If you haven't yet, please

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